On 26 January 1788, the ships of the First Fleet started unloading the first of more than a thousand people – convicted criminals, officers, marines, women and children – who would set up camp in what became the city of Sydney.

What happened during the first days, weeks and months of contact between the British who arrived and the Aboriginal people who lived there?

Transcript

Keri Phillips: Hello, welcome to Rear Vision. I'm Keri Phillips. On 26th January 1788, the ships of the First Fleet started unloading the first of more than a thousand people—convicted criminals, officers, marines, women and children—who would set up camp in what became the city of Sydney. How we remember this date has become the subject of debate but it's not the subject of this program. Instead, we'll hear about the earliest days, weeks and months of contact between the British who arrived and the Aboriginal people who lived there, as they engaged with each other across a cultural chasm.

Dr Shino Konishi:

Shino Konishi: I'm a historian at the University of Western Australia. I'm also Aboriginal, so I identify with the Yawuru people of Broome in Western Australia.

When the British arrived in 1788 they already had what they thought was enough knowledge about Aboriginal people, gained from the accounts of the British explorer William Dampier who landed in the north-west of Australia in 1688 and 1699, and then also the accounts of the Endeavour expedition which visited New South Wales in 1770, so that was led by Captain James Cook who then claimed New South Wales on behalf of the British Crown, which at that time comprised almost half of the continent and the islands to the east.

So from those two accounts we have similar but significant differences in the descriptions of Aboriginal people. So firstly Dampier was very denigratory. He is most famous in Australia for describing Aboriginal people as 'the miserablest people in the world'. So to him their lack of material culture was very significant. They didn't seem to be interested in trading any objects with him, they weren't interested in any of his belongings. So he was very dismissive.

Then when Cook came he had Dampier's depiction of Aboriginal people in his mind, and he similarly noticed that he didn't see houses, although Joseph Banks, the botanist with him, did describe a village at Botany Bay, so it must have been a fairly extensive campsite there. And again, the Aboriginal people of New South Wales didn't appear that interested in trade. However, Cook did come to a different conclusion to Dampier. He felt that rather than this lack of material culture and interest in material objects, rather than that being a sign of their miserableness, he instead thought it meant that they seemed far happier than Europeans because it meant that they didn't have any inequality in their society, so this didn't give way to any jealousies and inequities.

So I guess when the First Fleet arrived, they did have some idea about the material and technological culture of Aboriginal people. They falsely believed from Cook that Aboriginal people only lived on the coast because they subsisted in entirely on fish, which is what Cook thought. And so they didn't realise how rich and diverse Indigenous diets were. They did think that they were one people. It took them a while to recognise all the different languages and different cultural practices. They also thought because there were no obvious leaders, it wasn't a highly stratified society as the British had witnessed in the Pacific Islands, for instance, so they felt that there was no one to negotiate with and no recognisable form of government or system of law which contributed to Cook not negotiating with any Indigenous people before he claimed possession on behalf of the crown.

So they did come with the expectation that the land was available, and when the First Fleet arrived the instructions didn't include any acknowledgement that Indigenous people may have owned the land or have any entitlements other than to be treated humanely.

Grace Karskens: I'm Professor Grace Karskens and I teach Australian history at the University of New South Wales.

Phillip himself had instructions to 'conciliate the natives', I'm using a quote there, to treat them kindly, and they were expected to be incorporated into British society. This is really important because it explains why Phillip is so openhanded and friendly. He puts down his weapon when he arrives. They immediately try and make contact with the local Indigenous people, they ask for water and the Indigenous people point out…we even know where that stream is, so we know where this all happened, on Botany Bay on the beach there in 1788.

The thing that they don't realise is that Aboriginal people in the Sydney region are made up of many, many groups who may or may not get on with each other and have their own close-knit bands who move around certain territory and do interact with others and do have rights to other territory, and it's very complex, and the British have no idea about this of course, they think they are all one people. At it's worse than that because Cook and Banks from their very short stay in Botany Bay decided that the Indigenous people of Australia were weak, incurious, cowardly and would run away. So that's the image that they came with. They thought these people would just move on, they wouldn't be a problem. And it's also very important to know that because that is why they didn't make a treaty with them, they decided that the land was not owned by these people. They couldn't see any houses, any political organisation, they couldn't see any cultivation. Those are all the markers for British people of owning land. And of course they couldn't see what was right before their eyes. Of course Aboriginal people cultivate the land, they just do it in a different way. Of course they have a political organisation, it's a very tight one. They couldn't see it. And they do build, but it's just that in this one area in Australia they don't build very much, which is a historical coincidence which had huge impacts.

So the British come thinking they are going to lay claim to the territory and the Aboriginal people won't fight back because they don't own it and they are too simple, and nothing, nothing could be further from the truth, and that's what shocked them. In the first place, when they went around Botany Bay and then later Sydney Harbour because Phillip was looking for a better place to settle, they encounter different groups, and they realised that they didn't have to make friends with one group of people and that would be it, they had to do it over and over again. Every time they met another group of people they had to go through all the gift-giving, the dancing, the gun demonstrations, which was what they also did. They wanted to be friends but they wanted to show them what their guns could do, and that had a huge impact on Aboriginal people, as you would expect.

So it's very complex for the British to try and understand, and they don't actually even realise that between, say, Sydney and the Hawkesbury there are different languages, they don't realise that for two years.

Keri Phillips: After deciding that Botany Bay wasn't a suitable place to settle, Arthur Phillip set off to find a better one.

Grace Karskens: Phillip has taken his people and sailed up and rowed up into Sydney Harbour, and they pop in all over the place. They sail into Camp Cove and meet the people there, then they cross over to North Harbour. Everywhere they go there are people on the clifftops shouting at them, 'Warra warra, warra warra,' which doesn't sound like a welcome to them, it sounds a bit aggressive.

Then they go to Manly, which is a very, very important site in our early history, our early contact history. And there about 20 very well-built warriors, well-armed, well-built, wade out to meet the boats. If you were a British person and expecting them to be weak, cowardly and run away, this might be a little off-putting, and it was. They didn't even land, they didn't even come out of their boats because this was a bit of a stand-off. So they had a bit of a parlay with them and sailed away again.

And finally they find a snug little cove called, in Aboriginal language, Warrane, which later became known as Sydney Cove, and there was a beautiful stream of fresh water there. That's not the only freshwater stream in the harbour, they are all over the place, we have a map of them. But as far as I've been able to tell and other historians, this is the only place where there are no Aboriginal people on the shore waving spears at them or shouting 'Warra warra', there's nobody there, and I think that that is why Phillip chose Sydney Cove.

Jakelin Troy: I'm Professor Jakelin Troy, I'm the director for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research at the University of Sydney. I work in the office of the Deputy Vice Chancellor for Research. I'm Ngarigu and my country is the Snowy Mountains of south-eastern New South Wales.

When the First Fleet arrived there were a lot of people actually down at the beach, if you like, on the edge of the harbour, which was a big surprise to Arthur Phillip and his other officers with him because the expectation was that the country was almost empty of people, because when Cook had arrived in 1770 he arrived in winter and of course people were not down at the beach, they were away from the coastline and sheltering because it's colder. And when Phillip arrived of course people were down at the beach fishing, camping and doing all the sorts of things that people will do in good clement summer weather, so it was high summer, it was January.

So because there were all these people around, instead of just the handful that Phillip was expecting, there was a lot of early interaction between both the people coming into Australia…I talk about the invading First Fleet, because effectively that's what they were, they were coming to take over the country of the Aboriginal people. So the first thing we know is that the British didn't have a very clear view, or if they did they were ignoring the fact that Aboriginal people owned the country that they were in. There was a different understanding of, if you like, land ownership. So unless you were tilling fields and building big edifices and looking like you were quite sedentary in a British sort of way, you were not seen to be landowning people.

So right from the start it's quite clear that there were cultural differences, legal differences, differences of understanding of how people engage with the land and with country. This actually became pretty clear to the First Fleet very quickly, to Phillip as the governing officer and to his other officers, that actually these people had a very strong sense of ownership of the country. They were protective. When Phillip and his men cut trees down to build structures, the Aboriginal people of Sydney were horrified because you don't cut a whole tree down. You might take its bark to make string or to make a shelter or something, or you might take some leaves, you might take some of the products that will regrow, but you don't destroy a resource by chopping it down. So they were completely horrified by some of the ways in which these First Fleeters treated the country.

And equally, Phillip and others found the way in which Aboriginal people treated the country difficult for them to deal with because one of the things of course was to burn country. If you don't burn country then you end up with the country changing quite dramatically very quickly. Our bush regrows very, very quickly, and a wonderful book by Bill Gammage about…The Biggest Estate on Earth talks about how in fact Aboriginal people very carefully landscaped the environment, and Sydney was of course part of that grand landscaping. There were kangaroo grounds where people hunted, indeed where Sydney University sits now was a kangaroo ground, a sloping area where people would hunt kangaroo and, if you like, farm them.

Shino Konishi: When Governor Phillip or Captain Phillip arrived in Botany Bay, for instance, he did come with the expectation that it was going to be rich for agriculture, which is what Joseph Banks had previously said when they had visited in 1770. So instead he found it completely unsuitable. So to British eyes they were looking at the land as a resource to be cultivated, to enable pasturage, agriculture. And so when all of the convicts disembarked in Sydney Cove, David Collins, the Judge Advocate of the colony, he reported that everyone had to step down into woods, that there was no clearing, and so their first action was to immediately start clearing the land.

So for British eyes what they needed was open space in order to create their camps, create pens for the livestock and with available pasturage. And David Collins actually said that the abode of silence and tranquillity that they encountered was now changed to that of noise, clamour and confusion. So I guess for British eyes the woods was something that you needed to clear in order to discover the actual resources they wanted, which was water, grasslands, plant foods that they could eat and use as medicines, whereas to the Eora's people's eyes, the environment would have been completely different. Wildlife, animals and birds would not have been purely just game to be hunted and eaten, some would have been totems for different individuals and clans.

So, for instance, there was one account of one of the First Fleet members shooting a bird, and an Aboriginal man running forward and shouting at him in his own language, which the British man couldn't understand, but here we see a different point of view about this bird. Similarly, some accounts of the British chopping down trees and Aboriginal people rushing forth and shouting at them about what they were doing. So I guess this notion of just wholesale land-clearing that the British undertook was quite an affront.

Ann McGrath: That's very true, and there were so many of them.

Keri Phillips: Professor Ann McGrath is the director of the Australian Centre for Indigenous History at the ANU.

Ann McGrath: And of course they had these huge nets where they just caught hundreds of fish at a time and planned to keep them to feed their own. And of course the Aboriginal people who had authority over that part of the water and that part of the land and those fish must have been incredulous to think these people were suddenly just taking their fish unauthorised.

Keri Phillips: You're listening to Rear Vision with Keri Phillips on Radio National, RN. Today we're hearing about the first encounters between Aboriginal people and the British who arrived first at Botany Bay and then Sydney Cove to set up a penal colony in January 1788.

Ann McGrath: Well, at Port Jackson when the fleet of ships with convicts and marines aboard arrived, there was great puzzlement about discerning the gender of the British arrivals. The Aboriginal people were very bemused by the fact that these men (we now know they were) had arrived, but to the local Aboriginal people, the Dharug, the Eora, the Cammeraygal, the different groups around Sydney, they didn't know what to make of these people because they were wearing a brocaded clothing with buttons that was covering their gender specific features.

So one of the first things that happened in the encounters at Port Jackson was that the Aboriginal people gestured to the English to ask them what sex they were, basically. So they pointed to their chins, because the English were clean-shaven, and Aboriginal men thought that that was a feature of women at the time, so there were contrasting fashions going on. And King, for example, one of the lieutenants on the First Fleet, was asked to actually show his genitals, and he didn't really want to do this so he asked one of his crew to do so. And the Aboriginal men just thought it was hilarious because they really had taken these new arrivals for women.

Grace Karskens: However, the shock of strangeness isn't toxic to them, they were used to strangers, they had words for them, 'berewalgal' is the word for stranger. They had protocols for meeting strangers. Other Aboriginal groups were just as strange to them. People from a long way away would have been just as strange to them as these strange people arriving in these huge canoes, which was what they called the ships, 'mari nawi', huge, very big canoe.

The fact that they were white was odd. And we know something about what they thought because white people later were obsessed about asking Aboriginal people; what did you think of us when we first came here? What did you think? Who did you think we were? And so some people said they thought they were possums up in the trees, they thought the ships might have been islands that were moving. And there's a lot of traditions around Australia where they thought they were ghosts of returned Aboriginal people. At the time they just '[scoffs], you know, silly people, they are so simple, they think we're ghosts'. But it's actually…a ghost coming back from the dead is actually away, again, of incorporating somebody into the reality of life. It's a way of explaining their presence, and explaining new things is what Aboriginal people are very good at. It's just that these people were so uncivilised, they didn't know any protocols. When you meet someone you don't just bowl up and show them things, you wait until you're invited to come and talk, and that's not what they did.

Ann McGrath: They really didn't know what to make of each other, and the English gents, it appears, and they're the ones who kept the journals and that is the main written evidence that we have to go on, they actually saw Aboriginal women and clearly lusted after them, but they tried to explain it in their own terms. So some of them compared them with women that they might have imagined from the Garden of Eden. And of course Milton's Paradise Lost was a big influence then, very popular. Others referred to Aboriginal women as wood nymphs because they were very influenced by classical Greek stories, and even by the aesthetics of Greek sculpture, and they started to try to describe the women as if they were statues in an English country garden.

The Europeans came with this whole history that was also part of the English language, and it was a shared history between different cultures in Europe and North Africa and so forth, and they just seemed lost in terms of how Aboriginal people would have explained their universe and their world. They just seemed to assume that the only metaphors, the only analogies had to be something to do with Venus or the noble savage imagery. They had no idea that Aboriginal people had their own storied landscape imbued with sacred meaning. All that was beyond the European imagination, and instead they were trying to impose their own ideas from their own learning systems. So you can imagine that a lot of the conflict and the tension was caused by a total failure of the English to realise there were protocols before you went on to certain people's lands and that you had to ask permission, you had to ask permission to shoot an animal or…the British had some sense that their law had arrived but they didn't seem to appreciate that there was a whole repertoire of Aboriginal law that they hadn't even asked after.

Jakelin Troy: The Aboriginal people incorporate people…we incorporate people into our societies. So I don't know whether there necessarily was a view that these people would come and then they would go. That's normal practice. You don't just come into someone's country and stay without being invited. But these were extraordinary people. There is some indication that early on the Aboriginal people in Sydney weren't sure whether or not they were human. There were all kinds of things that the First Fleeters did, they jumped up on horses and rode them around and did all sorts of things that Aboriginal people had never seen anybody doing. But again, you're not talking about people who weren't able to look at what they were seeing, analyse it, think about it. So I think it became very clear very early that these people were planning to stay at least for quite a long time. They very quickly put up semipermanent dwellings. Again, they were things that had not been seen by the Sydney mob.

Keri Phillips: After the British set up camp at Sydney Cove, Aboriginal people stayed away.

Shino Konishi: I mean, we have to go over quite a long period of time. So you have an initially Indigenous older man, a few individuals might have come up and had interactions, and then there was a long period of very little interaction, very few Indigenous people coming into contact with the British. And so this led Governor Phillip to decide that the only way to force an interaction was to kidnap an Aboriginal person who could then be shown the benevolent aims of the British and might give them information about how many Aboriginal people were there, where they lived and then act as a sort of mediator. So they did this by kidnapping an Aboriginal man called Arabanoo, and he stayed there for many months and unfortunately he died whilst there. So he wasn't able to go back and tell his people what the British wanted him to be able to tell them. So they again then decided to kidnap some Aboriginal individuals again, and the second time they kidnapped Colebee who quickly escaped, and Bennelong, who stayed for many months and became a very key figure after that.

So I guess the initial response was one of curiosity, what we see from the very first individuals who then seem to be in some respects either disinterested or dismayed by what they are seeing of the British, which is why you don't have many coming back again for a while, which isn't to say that they are not watchful from a distance. And then I guess the experiences of Arabanoo and then Colebee and Bennelong being kidnapped, and for Arabanoo and Bennelong being held captive for long periods of time, which entailed also being continuously manacled or wearing a cuff at least, and iron cuff, would have been terrifying. But then they both seemed to make the most of their incarceration. And then I guess finally after Bennelong escapes, months later he is observed by the British again and he then does facilitate more Eora people coming into contact with the British, coming into the colony. And I think that individuals do work out how to engage with the British.

Jakelin Troy: The fact that there was a lot of communication and engagement is evidenced in the fact that a pidgin language developed very early. So the British attempted to learn the local Aboriginal languages. Some of the First Fleet officers were very good at that, William Dawes in particular who was Sir Joseph Banks's protégé and came here to do the weather observations and astronomical observations. Dawes Point Battery is where he set up his little observation point. And he worked with the local Aboriginal community to learn the language and document it.

But because the Aboriginal people were learning English much more rapidly than the non-Aboriginal community were learning the local Aboriginal language, which is variously called Gadigal or Dharug or sometimes Eora, what happened was a sort of inter-language began. It looks like it was a pidgin, which in my own research I call New South Wales Pidgin, that was the subject of my research for the last 30 years, including also the language of the Sydney area.

And there's a lot of evidence in these so-called language materials, wordlists for the Sydney language, for Gadigal or Dharug, that tell you there's a lot of very tender, intimate communication going on. There are words on the wordlist for Sydney, for example, to warm your hands by the fire, and then to take someone else's hands in your hands and warm their hands. So these are not people who are trying to kill each other.

Arthur Phillip issued an edict at one point because there was starting to be growing conflict. He said to particularly his officers Watkin Tench and William Dawes to go and find I think it was 10 Aboriginal men, kill them, cut their heads off, bring their heads back and stick them on the posts around the palisade fort at Sydney, and that is what the British normally did. You know, in the 18th century if you wanted to tell people you'd exacted justice or give a warning, you put people who were traitors or whatever, you put their heads on display. So William Dawes who had already become very close to the local Aboriginal community because of his language studies, and Watkin Tench who was also a humanist, it's the late 18th century, people are very troubled about committing atrocities against other people, even if they are legal atrocities, so neither of them were able to find any Aboriginal people, surprise surprise, because Dawes had almost certainly told the Aboriginal people he knew to keep right away, that this is what the orders were. So they couldn't find anyone.

Phillip could be very summary, but he was also a man in a situation where he was surrounded by potentially hostile people he didn't really know. There was the beginning of some hostilities, as I said, provoked by theft. I mean, the Sydney mob were also telling the First Fleeters, all right, you're here to stay by the look of it, but you're going to do things our way, not your way. So there was some argy-bargy around who is in control, and Phillip being an officer, military officer and naval officer, he was used to doing things the British way.

It's important to understand that whole period in the context of the time. There's no doubt there was a lot of shock horror on both sides, the British and this largely Irish convict group that was brought to Australia to establish a settlement, a colony, and shock horror, on the part of the Aboriginal community here as well. But I think it's very important to understand that people did understand each other as human beings.

Keri Phillips: Professor Jakelin Troy, the director of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research at the University of Sydney. The other people you heard were: Professor Ann McGrath, the director of the Australian Centre for Indigenous History at the ANU; Dr Shino Konishi, a historian from the University of Western Australia; and Professor Grace Karskens, from the University of New South Wales, who is also the author of an excellent book on the history of early Sydney called The Colony.

Steven Tilley is the sound engineer for this Rear Vision. Bye from Keri Phillips.